A course can include scenarios in different directories. This allows scenarios to be re-used and re-purposed in different situations.

An example of this would be including the following:

{
    "pathway_id" "environment-usages",
    "course_id": "ubuntu",
    "title": "Ubuntu 16.04 Instance",
    "description": "General purpose environment"
},

This would reference the scenario Ubuntu from the environment-usages course.

Katacoda has a command line interface which helps to create the required files of courses and scenarios, etc.

You can install the CLI using the following command: npm i katacoda-cli --global

The commands follow the syntax $ katacoda COMMAND

If you need help, to see the available commands, you can run katacoda --help

To create a course, for example, called test-course, you can run the following command and follow the steps:

cd katacoda-scenario-examples
katacoda courses:create

The CLI will prompt you a few questions about:

• Title: title of the course, displayed on the intro screen
• Description: description of the course, displayed on the intro screen
• Friendly-url: here you will type test-course. This attribute will determine the name of the folder of your course, and the URL to access it, so, should not contain spaces, should be lower case, etc. For example, if your username is test-username and your course was called test-course the URL to point the course in the platform will be https://katacoda.com/test-username/courses/test-course/

After that the CLI will create the pathway file and the folder. ls test-course*

You can see the definition of the empty course in katacoda-scenario-examples/test-course-pathway.json

{
  "title": "test-course",
  "description": "Example course",
  "courses": []
}

The CLI can be used to add existing scenarios to a course.

You can list your available scenarios, using this command: find ./ -type f | grep index.json

For example, can add the existing scenario, called quiz to the previous created course test-course running the following command and follow the steps: katacoda courses:add:scenarios

The CLI will prompt you a few questions about:

• Scenario path: type ./quiz
• Course path: type ./test-course

And then select if you want to copy or move the scenario to the course folder.

After that, you can see the scenario was added in your test-course opening katacoda-scenario-examples/test-course-pathway.json

{
  "title": "test-course",
  "description": "Example course",
  "courses": [
    {
      "course_id": "quiz",
      "title": "Interactive Quiz",
      "description": "Verify understand and key points by using an interactive quiz"
    }
  ]